The present invention generally relates to an electronic filing apparatus for filing document data in which image data is obtained by scanning a document and the image data is recorded and registered on an optical disk which allows for retrieval of the document data in the optical disk, and more particularly relates to the improvement for reducing processing time for recording and registering image data on an optical disk of an electronic filing apparatus of this type.
Electronic filing apparatuses constructed with a personal computer in recent years have an image reading part such as a scanner, for reading out image data by scanning a document, and an image recording part such as a disk drive unit, for recording and registering image data from the scanned document on a disk storage medium. The image data is transferred to the image recording part, and recorded on the disk storage medium which is, for example, an optical disk that is placed in an optical disk drive unit. The optical disk usually is a large-capacity storage medium.
The scanner of an electronic filing apparatus is capable of scanning a document so as to generate image data into which image signals from the scanned document are converted photoelectrically. The optical disk drive unit of the electronic filing apparatus is capable of recording on an optical disk a large quantity of image data from the scanned document. The image data recorded on the optical disk can be read out and re-recorded, by means of the optical disk drive unit, for future retrieval and registration of document data.
In a conventional electronic filing apparatus, a document with a plurality of pages is successively scanned page by page by the scanner, and the image data from each page of the scanned document is recorded on an optical disk. More specifically, image data from a first page of the document is read out by the scanner, and, after the reading out thereof is completed, the image data is recorded onto an optical disk by the optical disk drive unit. Similarly, with respect to the subsequent pages of the document, after the reading of image data from each of the pages of the document is completed, the image data is recorded on the optical disk. The optical disk is a large-capacity storage medium and is useful for retaining a large quantity of image information. However, when compared with a medium-capacity disk storage medium like a hard disk having a relatively short access time, there is a problem in that an access time for recording image data on a large-capacity disk storage medium like the optical disk is considerably long when compared with the access time in the case of such a medium-capacity disk storage medium as the hard disk. The reading out of image data by the scanner and the recording of the image data by the optical disk drive unit on the optical disk are alternately performed by the conventional electronic filing apparatus, and it takes a relatively long time to record the image data on the optical disk. For this reason, in the case of the conventional electronic filing apparatus, there is a problem in that the efficiency of document processing by the apparatus inevitably becomes worse when the image data is recorded on an optical disk.